The new Sony Walkman music players have a beautiful and stunning look, Android 12

Sony has a pair of new Android Walkmans, and NW-A300 And NW-ZX700. Yes that’s right, wviolins Sony’s legendary music player brand since the 80’s. Apple may have abandoned the idea of ​​having a music player adjacent to a smartphone Killed the iPod Touch line Recently, however, Sony has been making Android Walkmans and has had them for a while. The first was in 2012 with Android 2.3 Gingerbread NWZ-Z1000, which looked like Sony had just stripped the modem from the Xperia phone and pushed it to market as a music player. Since then, Sony has made designs with more purpose-built hardware, and today there is a whole series of Android Walkman music players. Unfortunately, these new products only appear to be on sale in Japan, the UK, and Europe at the moment.

We’ll start with the most consumer-friendly model, the NW-A300. This basic design first appeared in 2019 with NW-A105, but shipped with Android 9. This is an upgraded version of that device with a less outdated version of Android, a new SoC, and a clamshell back design. In Sony’s home country of Japan, the 32GB version is priced at 46,000 yen (about $360), while in Europe it’s 399 euros (about $430).

The NW-A300 is a very small device measuring 56.6 x 98.5 x 12mm, which is very close to a deck of cards. And really, just a look in these photos. Sony may not be the consumer electronics juggernaut it used to be, but it still has an incredible product design department. I have no use for a standalone music player, but both Walkmans are so beautiful that I just want to keep a music player.

The front is dominated by a 3.6-inch, 60Hz, 1280 x 720 LCD touchscreen. There’s 32GB of storage, and the device supports Wi-Fi 802.11AC and Bluetooth 5. That’s all Sony wants to talk about. Official specifications. It touts “longer battery life” but doesn’t say how big the battery is, counting only “36 hours* of 44.1kHz FLAC playback, up to 32 hours* of 96kHz High-Resolution FLAC audio playback.” Presumably that’s it with the screen off.

For more specifications, we can visit Walkman blog, Great site that’s very serious about these little music players. In October, the site found documentation for the A300 that lists a 1,500mAh battery. The earlier NW-A100 model was the system-on-a-chip NXP i.MX8M- Mini, which is an extremely slow 28nm chip with four Arm Cortex-A53 CPUs and 4GB of RAM. You can say, “This is just a music player,” but that’s not really true because it’s still full Android with an app store and everything. Geekbench scores It showed that this has a new quad-core Qualcomm chip of some sort with 4GB of RAM, but we can’t be sure of the model number. A newer chip with smaller transistors likely accounts for much of the “better battery life” promise.

This is a music player, so of course there is a headphone jack on the bottom of the unit. You’ll also find a place for a cord, a fast USB-C 3.2 Gen1 port for quickly transferring music, and a MicroSD slot to store all your music. The buttons on the side of the device also give you every music control you could want, such as hold, previous, play/pause, next, volume and power controls.